"We are devastated to hear of this accident," said Ang Tsering Sherpa, the president of the Union of Asian Alpine Associations.

"In the season there are up to 50 flights per day into Lukla so the pilots are very used to landing there."

Flights from Kathmandu to Lukla take just over half an hour.

Yeti is a privately owned domestic airline founded in 1998 and which prides itself on running a service to many far-flung destinations across Nepal.

It has previously provided essential transport links to national and international relief teams working in Nepal as well as carrying many tourists.

The tourism trade is a major foreign currency earner for impoverished Nepal and since the end of a civil war in 2006 between the country's Maoists and the government, numbers of foreign visitors have increased.

This year around 500,000 tourists are expected, the highest number since 1999, with many coming to trek in the stunning Himalayan mountains that form Nepal's northern border with Chinese-controlled Tibet.

The Everest Base Camp trek -- where tourists fly into Lukla and walk for around two weeks -- is one of the most popular routes.

'A three-minute descent that lasts a life-time'

By Matt Kelly, Associate Editor

The flight from Kathmandu to Lukla takes just 40 minutes - but the final three of those minutes last a lifetime.

For some, literally.

My wife and I flew the Yeti Airlines service five years ago this week, at the beginning of our honeymoon trek to the foot of Everest.

From the moment of take off, the mood among the trekkers and mountaineers is light-humoured, exciteable, jokey.

If you strike lucky, as we did, and get the front row seats, the view straight down the cockpit window of the Himalayas is stupendous.

Then, as the twin-prop Otter clears the mountain ridge at the head of the Lukla valley, the mood shifts from excitement to disbelief. Disbelief that the small matchstick-shaped strip wedged at a steep angle into the side of the mountain could really be where these two Nepalese pilots - suddenly now tense and focussed on the job at hand - intend to ground this plane.

Those who make the journey regularly, like the Sherpas returning to their nearby village Namche Bazaar, seem as nervous as the first-timers.

Of course, the Sherpas know the risk.

And from your pilot's-eye, front-seat view, you get a good idea too. Old chunks of rusting wreckage lie scattered across the mountainside, a few desperate metres short of the runway where the Otter eventually clunks down, tyres screaming on the asphalt.

Tomorrow's trekkers will have fresh wreckage to contemplate.

A fortnight later, on our return to Kathmandu, bad weather shut the Lukla airfield. Days of delay are perfectly normal.

There's nothing to do but secure a room at one of the lodges scattered round the airstrip and sit it out, passing the time drinking the Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky flown in at great expense on the same planes that will take you out, with luck, once the cloud lifts and the planes arrive from Kathmandu, filled with people who love mountains, and willing to take a risk or two for the sake of a trip of a lifetime...